Day: July 18, 2012

[Adam] had a really impressive DJ controller build featured here recently. Many of you had more questions about the internals and such, so this post should clarify a few things. He’s still got a few more updates to make, but promises to reveal all if given enough time!

Noise Absorbing Headphones from Shooting Earmuffs

If the circuitry on your microphone-enabled shooting earmuffs has gone bad, the actual speakers may still be good. Why not convert them into some noise-blocking headphones? For that matter, if you’ve broken a pivot, there’s a simple solution for that too!

Help Choosing your CNC Router

If you’re in the market for a CNC router, but aren’t sure where to start, Ponoko has put together a handy pricing guide to several of the more popular DIY routers available.

DIY AC Unit

It’s very hot out, so what is one to do when your shop or garage is burning up? Why not build your own “AC unit?” Sure you have to supply your own ice, but at under $20 for this cooler-based unit, maybe it’s worth it. Here’s the Reddit thread explaining it as well as a picture of the finished product.

3D Topo Map on a CNC Router

Once you’ve purchased your CNC router using the above guide, why not make your own 3D top map? This tutorial features a map of Ross Island off of Antarctica. Why Ross Island? It was the first vector-format topo map found off of Wikimedia.

Reader, [klemens], suggested DMG Lib to us when we posted about a similar site. DMG-Lib is an amazing source of information. It’s primary downside is that a great portion of the text is in a language other than English, though in some ways this is a plus. Latin, Italian, German, and many other languages held the position of being the chief scientific language of the world long before English, and this repository holds entire books about mechanisms in those languages. Some of the books range all the way back to the 1500s. The mechanism animations are very good on this site and play smoothly. While it’s a little harder to search than KMODDL due to the language oddities, it’s still an extremely useful and interesting site to add to the hacker’s information toolbox.

He took a look around the room and spied an Arduino doing a whole lot of nothing, so he set off to build a system that would allow him to automatically record his drinking habits without the use of his smartphone. The system is not overly complex, and measures pours using flow sensors, uploading the results to Untappd using their “check-in” API. [Jeff] was sure to include several other useful features into his build, including a lockout timer that prevents multiple check-ins when simply topping off a pint, as well as “neighbor mode” which lets you pour a round for friends without recording the pour.

Be sure to check out the build in its entirety on [Jeff’s] site, and let us know if you’re doing something equally cool with your keg setup at home.